Saturday papers – 25 February 2017

Brexit

The Expressreports the possibility of thousands of EU migrants flooding into the UK before Brexit is finalised.

THE Government is under pressure to drop proposals for a “transitional period” before leaving the EU after new figures suggest it could lead to public services being overwhelmed by migrants.
A report by the pro-Brexit campaign group Change Britain has revealed that a transitional arrangement which would allow free movement to continue over five years would see 912,000 to 970,000 EU nationals pouring into the UK.
The findings show that the influx will heighten pressure on our housing meaning that Britain will require the construction of between 69,000 and 74,000 homes just to house EU migrants.
This will put substantial pressure on our school system, and would cost between £753 million and £793 million.

EU

The Mailreports a deal going down in the European Parliament to stop the UK getting a good deal on Brexit.

LEFTIST politicians in the European Parliament have struck a pact with Labour to feed them information about Theresa May’s negotiating strategy in a bid to thwart an “ultra-hard” Brexit.
MEPs from the Socialist and Democrats (S&D) party say they will leak information the British Government gives to Brussels to Jeremy Corbyn so that he can ambush the prime minister on the progress of the talks at PMQs.
They vowed to “make sure a hard Brexit is hard for the Government to get” and to work together with British europhiles to stop the PM from pulling the UK out of the single market.
The move demonstrates the determination within the ranks of the EU Parliament, which is staunchly europhile, to try and keep Britain as close to the bloc after Brexit as possible.
One of its most influential left-wing politicians today said that Labour “cannot trust” the Tories to keep them up to date on the divorce talks, and so promised to do so in her place.

And in a separate story, the Mailalso reports a threat to our state pension cold be caused by mass migration.

MASS EU migration is a £30 billion a year threat to Britain’s state pension, a new report has warned.
The comprehensive paper – How the £30 billion cost of EU migration Imperils Pensions & Benefits – by the thinktank Global Britain has blown apart claims that the UK needs EU migration to support its pension system.
Instead it reveals that cheap labour flooding in from the continent is causing “an economic catastrophe” for the UK which threatens the pension system.
And the report suggests that leaving the EU and taking back control of British borders will provide the UK with “a £250 billion opportunity” in the next five years.

The Guardianclaims the UK will be told it can’t start post-Brexit talks until it hands billions of pounds to the EU.

EU member states are backing a European commission demand that trade talks can only start once Britain has agreed to pay a hefty Brexit bill, despite fears of a backlash from Theresa May.
The Czech Republic has joined Germany, Italy and France in insisting the UK must come to an arrangement on the divorce settlement, expected to come to about €60bn (£50bn), before any substantive negotiations on a future relationship.
The move comes despite privately held concerns in Brussels, expressed in a document obtained by the Guardian, that Britain will react badly to the bill.
“The scenario of setting a heavy Brexit ‘divorce’ bill could prove to be risky as it might cause backlash by the UK during negotiations,” European parliament officials told the powerful committee on economic and monetary affairs. It is understood that the commission’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, has also privately expressed concerns about how MPs will react.

But other countries are considering returning to their own currency, says Westmonster.

In a sign of growing scepticism across the continent with regards to the failed single currency, the Netherlands are holding a full parliamentary inquiry into whether or not they want to ditch the Euro.
It is interesting timing to hold the inquiry ahead of the Dutch elections as the anti-EU Geert Wilders continues to lead the polls. This mirrors the trend in France where the anti-Euro, anti-EU Marine Le Pen is also first in the polls.
This inquiry is likely a move to try and paint the Dutch political establishment as vaguely eurosceptic in a bid to thwart Wilders, though it is unlikely the Dutch electorate will be fooled quite so easily after years of EU submission.
As the economic catastrophe continues in Greece, which is effectively being held as the EU’s prisoner inside the Euro, attitudes towards mass migration are hardening in Holland. Some 80% of voters are now concerned by the policy of mass migration, something which can only be properly dealt with by withdrawing from the EU.

French elections

In France, the woman most likely to become the next president claims it is time for the EU to go, says Breitbart.

Marine Le Pen, the frontrunner in the first round of France’s upcoming presidential elections, has declared it is “time do away” with the European Union (EU), which has become a “bureaucratic monster”.According to EU Observer, the Front National leader told journalists it is time to “build another Europe, whether madame Merkel, monsieur Schulz or the other Commissioners want it or not”.
The 48-year-old said “It is time to do away with an EU that is tempted by a fusion that destroys the Europe of nations”, echoing the sentiments of France’s late post-war leader, General Charles De Gaulle.
The De Gaullist vision of a Europe of sovereign nation-states co-operating on a voluntary basis is in stark contrast to the modern, federalist vision of the EU articulated by establishment politicians such as Martin Schulz, the former President of the European Parliament who hopes to become the next Chancellor of Germany.

And the Telegraphreports the possibility of criminal charges being laid against her main rival.

Conservative French presidential candidate Francois Fillon moved a step closer to being charged on Friday night after a financial prosecutor asked an investigative judge to launch a probe into whether his British wife was paid large sums of money for a fictitious job.
The prosecutor had been conducting a preliminary probe into allegations that Penelope Fillon received more than €900,000 (£764,000) for a “fake job” as parliamentary assistant to her husband and his successor over several years.He has denied any wrongdoing in a case dubbed “Penelopegate”.
The affair has seen Mr Fillon, candidate for Right-wing The Republicans, lose ground in opinion polls, with the latest suggesting he stands to be eliminated by Front National candidate Marine Le Pen and independent rival Emmanuel Macron in the first round of the presidential election on April 23.

The sheer nerve of the man.
After a couple of missteps on the campaign trail, Emmanuel Macron has seen opinion polls slide against him.
The invitation to visit Downing Street was a helping hand from Theresa May.
He could pose on its steps and voters back home could imagine him in the role of statesman already.
Was Monsieur Macron grateful? Well, he didn’t show it.
After the meeting with the Prime Minister he strode over to waiting cameras and made a brazen appeal to people in Britain to flee the country after Brexit and cross the channel to France.
Banks, talent, researchers, academics are all welcome, he said.
Downing Street hasn’t been drawn to comment.

Local elections

The Prime Minister has told her supporters to fight Labour hard in this May’s local council elections, reports the Times.

Theresa May urged Tory councillors to crush Labour in forthcoming local authority and mayoral elections as she revelled in an historic by-election win.
The prime minister mocked Labour over its infighting and claims of infiltration by Trotskyists as she looked ahead to elections on May 4.
She told a conference of councillors: “Last year Labour’s deputy leader warned of entryism in Labour by the far left. This year even the Stalinists in Momentum are complaining about being infiltrated by the Trotskyists. But for those of us who remember what Militant did to Liverpool, it doesn’t matter what term you use: we can’t allow Labour to get a foothold back in local government.

Farage

Following our former leader’s apperance with Piers Morgan last evening, several of the media report parts of what he said. The Mailsays:

Britain’s decision to leave the European Union has set in motion a movement that will sweep the world, Nigel Farage told an influential meeting of American conservatives.
Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Mr Farage said the Brexit vote and Donald Trump‘s election had launched a ‘great global revolution’.
He said there could be similar results at upcoming elections in the Netherlands, France and Germany.
Mr Farage received a warm welcome at the conference, where he praised Trump’s ‘quite remarkable’ victory.
The former UKIP leader said: ‘2016, we did it!’ boomed the former head of Britain’s UK Independence Party. We witnessed the beginning of a global political revolution.
‘And it’s one that is not going to stop, it’s one that is going to roll out across the rest of the great world.’

Nigel Farage has said he is living like a “virtual prisoner” and is “frightened” to leave his home because of the way the media has “demonised” Ukip.
The former party leader accused the press of highlighting some members of the party with controversial views to try to discredit Ukip as a whole.
He told ITV’s Piers Morgan’s Life Stories: “It is because of these irrelevant people, who held no position, they happened to join an organisation, and because of these irrelevant people being demonised by liberal media, I’ve had to live years, frankly, of being frightened of walking out into the street all because the media picked out these people. And because of these people, attempted to demonise me and give me a bad name.
“And you’re surprised three years on, when I have to live like a virtual prisoner, that I’m not happy about it? Will I ever forgive the British media for what they’ve done to me? No.”

Former Ukip leader Nigel Farage has said the UK’s “real friends” speak English, in a remark seemingly aimed at the European Union.
Mr Farage addressed an enthusiastic audience at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, as right-wing Americans fully embraced the nationalism that characterises Trumpism and Brexit.
“Our real friends in the world speak English, have common law, and stand by us in times of crisis,” Mr Farage told the room of Trump supporters, in an apparent slight aimed at Britain’s nearest neighbours on the continent.
President Donald Trump addressed the room earlier in the day. He issued yet another attack on the media’s unflattering coverage, doubling down on his attack that the press is the “enemy”.
“A few days ago, I called the fake news ‘the enemy of the people’, and they are. They are the enemy of the people,” the billionaire President said. “Because they have no sources. They just make them up where there are none.”

Nigel Farage addressed the biggest conservative conference in America on Friday, claiming that Brexit and the election victory of Donald Trump were “the beginning of a great global revolution” that would continue on throughout the west.
“We’ve got some very exciting elections coming up in the Netherlands, in France, in Germany,” the former leader of the United Kingdom Independence party (Ukip) and one of the leading figures in the campaign to win Britain’s referendum on leaving the EU told the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
Far right leaders Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Marine le Pen in France are mounting strong challenges to established parties in both countries this year, and the Alternative für Deutschland party is attempting to do the same in Germany.
“What I do know is if the challengers don’t get over the line this year, what they will do is shift the center of gravity of the entire debate,” Farage added.

Business

Boeing is to open its first European factory in Sheffield, delivering a significant vote of confidence in post-Brexit Britain.
The £20million plant will manufacture parts and systems used on wings for the American aerospace giant’s best-selling 737 and 777 passenger planes.
Boeing’s UK boss said the company was drawn to Sheffield by its ‘world class’ workforce and its links to the city’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre, where it will launch a programme to develop new manufacturing techniques.
It comes two weeks after the supercar manufacturer McLaren announced it is planning to build a £50million chassis factory in the same area of Sheffield, creating 200 jobs.
Other multi-national firms including Nissan, Apple, Honda, Amazon and Airbus have also announced expansion plans since the referendum last June, confounding warnings that Brexit would scare off big business.

Labour Party

Following this week’s by-elections, the party continues in crisis, says the Independent.

Jeremy Corbyn’s “disastrous” performance is pushing Labour towards its worst general election since the 1930s, a leading member of his own team has warned.
The top frontbencher told The Independent that if the devastating Copeland by-election result were mirrored elsewhere, Labour would be left with just 150 seats in the House of Commons.
But with Mr Corbyn resisting calls to quit, the senior figure also accepted there was no way of preventing him leading the party into the 2020 election, adding: “We are just going to go off the cliff.”

JEREMY Corbyn’s allies tried to claim today that Labour’s by-election disaster was “an achievement”.
Voters deserted the party in droves as it lost a seat to the Tories which it had held since 1935.
It was also the first time since 1982 that a governing party had won a Commons seat from the Opposition.
But despite the Tories’ internal divisions over Brexit, they still overhauled Labour’s majority in Copeland, Cumbria.
Nearly all commentators saw it as a humiliation for Labour.
But Shadow Cabinet member Cat Smith tried to paint the outcome as a success.She said that “to be 15-18 points behind in the polls and push the Tories within 2,000 votes is an incredible achievement”.

Diesel

Despite being urged to buy diesel cars in the past, the Mailreports the latest research which says they are problematic.

Motorists should be wary of buying diesel vehicles, the Transport Secretary warned last night.
Chris Grayling suggested that an imminent clampdown on air pollution would encourage a switch to cleaner cars.
Asked whether motorists should hesitate before buying a diesel, he replied: ‘People should take a long, hard think about what they need – about where they’re going to be driving – and should make best endeavours to buy the least polluting vehicle they can.
‘I don’t think diesel is going to disappear but someone who is buying a car to drive around a busy city may think about buying a low-emission vehicle rather than a diesel.’

Drivers should think long and hard before buying a diesel car, the Transport Secretary has said.
Chris Grayling suggested motorists should consider buying a low-emission vehicle rather than spending their money on a diesel.
His intervention follows reports the Government is considering a scrappage scheme for diesel cars to improve air quality.
The reported scheme would see drivers offered a cash incentive for replacing an old diesel car with a low-emission vehicle.
Asked whether motorists should hesitate before buying a diesel, Mr Grayling told The Daily Mail: “People should take a long, hard think about what they need, about where they’re going to be driving, and should make best endeavour to buy the least polluting vehicle they can.
“I don’t think diesel is going to disappear but someone who is buying a car to drive around a busy city may think about buying a low-emission vehicle rather than a diesel.”

NHS

Two in five European doctors could leave the UK because of the Brexit vote in an exodus that would mean “disaster” for the NHS, a doctors’ union has warned.Medics no longer feel welcome in the country or appreciated by the Government in the wake of the EU referendum and are considering leaving, according to the British Medical Association (BMA) poll.More than 10,000 doctors in the NHS – nearly 7% of the workforce – are European-trained and a mass departure would place significant strain on a health service already struggling to cope.Accident and emergency departments are already suffering record numbers of patients facing long waits and many are being forced to close their doors because they cannot cope.

Education

Too many teachers are making common spelling, punctuation and grammar errors, it has been claimed.
They struggle to teach youngsters correct use of colons and how to spell words such as ‘definitely’ because they do not have a good enough grasp of the basics themselves.
This is because a generation of children who were taught ‘creativity’ rather than good grammar in schools in the 1970s and 80s are now in the teaching profession.
Mark Roberts, an assistant principal at a secondary comprehensive in the south west, said headteachers must draw up plans to ‘address areas of staff SPAG (spelling, punctuation and grammar) weakness’.

And a former education boss has hit out at the lack of taxes being paid by some independent schools, says the Independent.

Former education secretary Michael Gove has slammed independent schools for serving the offspring of the world’s global elite, while using their charitable status to avoid paying taxes in the manner of other private firms.
In a column written for The Times, entitled “Put VAT on school fees and soak the rich”, Mr Gove criticises the current system for still considering the education of the children of “plutocrats and oligarchs” to be a charitable activity. He argues that removing the tax advantages of private schools would boost standards in the state sector and raise vital extra funds.
“Private school fees are VAT-exempt. That tax advantage allows the wealthiest in this country, indeed the very wealthiest in the globe, to buy a prestige service that secures their children a permanent positional edge in society at an effective 20 per cent discount,” Mr Gove wrote.

Former education secretary Michael Gove yesterday called for 20 per cent VAT to be levied on private school fees to tax the rich and boost the quality of the state sector.
The Conservative MP for Surrey Heath questioned how prestigious independent schools can justify taking lucrative taxpayer-funded subsidies when they cater to the ‘global super-rich’.
Private schools are designated as charities and benefit from significant tax breaks worth tens of millions of pounds a year, including business rate relief and VAT exemption on their fees.
Mr Gove wrote in a newspaper column yesterday: ‘There is one group of highly successful enterprises that is pretty much insulated from the present row about business rates. Our private schools.
‘Because charities get an 80 per cent exemption from the levy. And, to my continuing surprise, we still consider the education of the children of plutocrats and oligarchs to be a charitable activity.’

Scotland

Once again, Nicola Sturgeon is considering a second independence referendum, says the Independent.

The Scottish government is seriously considering a second independence referendum next year, it has been claimed.
Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP is increasingly confident it would win a second vote, as the First Minister believes the circumstances around it would be different to the first poll because of Brexit.
Scots voted to remain a part of the UK by a wide margin in 2014.
Charles Grant, an adviser to the Scottish government’s Standing Council on Europe, told Reuters: “I believe the Scottish government is thinking very, very seriously about going for an independence referendum next year.
“They feel they have enough emotion and momentum to overcome the economic downsides … the harder the Brexit, the more likely they are to break away.”

Fly-tipping

London gangsters are thought to be behind a spate of industrial-scale fly-tipping that is leaving farmers living in fear of a so-called trash mafia.
Lorries laden with skips, 20 to 40 yards long, are being driven into fields in the middle of the night and spewing out hundreds of tonnes of compacted waste in a black market racket worth up to £1 billion a year.
Farmers in Essex said there had been 116 cases of “industrial-scale fly-tipping” since September. “This is serious, organised crime and they are making serious amounts of money,” Adam Scott, of the National Farmers Union (NFU), said.
Unlike regular fly-tipping, which comes from vans and car boots, the rubbish arriving on Essex farms arrives in eight-wheeled lorries with hydraulic lifts.

About The Author

Debbie has been a journalist for longer than she cares to admit! She has been freelance for the last 15 years and is deputy editor on INDEPENDENCE Daily, specialising in covering the morning press each day.

And some people here seem to think immigration not so important for UKIP? Trim and compromise? It’s live or die for us all as peoples.

JackT
on February 25, 2017 at 3:08 pm

EU:
Any transitional period would be a complete disaster and allow EU control to continue; that is not what we voted for. It is time May realised that negotiation with the EU is an impossible dream. We need the early repeal of the 1972 ECA and a clean break. Article 50 is only going to work against us and in favour of the remainers.

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